ASUS HD 6970 Review

Introduction:

The 69XX series has been out for a while now and the powerful HD 6970 is no secret. In fact, ASUS has released a few models of the HD 6970, one of which is equipped with a three-slot cooler. Today, we will be looking at ASUS's slightly overclocked reference card. Like all other versions of the card, the ASUS HD 6970 is equipped with the Cayman XT core, which has been given a nice little factory overclock of 10MHz. Not only that, but this little beast will offer you 24 SIMD/1536 streaming processors, 96 texture units, 32 ROPs and 2GB of GDDR5 memory. We've seen some pretty good performance from the 6970's, and I'm hoping to see equally great numbers from the ASUS HD 6970. If nothing else, I'd at least expect to see a pretty great overclock, especially using ASUS's voltage tweak utility.

Closer Look:

The Asus HD 6970 comes in a box that is more or less a standard for ASUS's reference design cards. It uses a pleasing orange and black color scheme and features ASUS's dark night mascot. As always, the front of the box features a few bits and pieces of information about the card. Small things like the amount of memory or that the card is factory overclocked. Flipping the box over reveals more detailed information about the ASUS HD 6970 as well a diagram of all the card's connectors that can be attached to a display.

Opening the box reveals the usual second black box with the gold ASUS logo. Inside this box are three sections with the top most containing all of the card's included accessories. The section to the right is used as a spacer to keep the ASUS HD 5950 nice and snug in its foam packaging. Underneath the first box is the card itself sitting nice and secure in black foam and concealed in an antistatic bag.

As for accessories, you'll be equipped with the usual. There is of course the driver CD, the user guide, a molex to 6-pin connector, and a crossfire bridge. There was not any kind of display adapter but the ASUS HD 6970 offers you enough display ports on the card that you should be able to do without one.

Now that we've got all of that out of the way, let's pull this card apart and see what makes it tick!